Technology in the trenches

[unixronin]

There is a possibility, by no means certain, that I may be writing some columns -- web columns, at first -- for Linux Journal.  I may possibly also be trying my hand at a regular weekly "Linux column practice" post here in my journal, to see whether I can actually come up with a weekly column.  I ask an open-ended question, therefore:

If this were to come to pass, what articles might you like to see?  Do you have unanswered questions about Linux or related to it?  Are there Linux-related issues you'd like to see someone cover in more depth or from different angles than you've read so far?

No guarantees.  No promises.  No warranty.  Consider this, at this stage, something akin to a market survey.

Comments

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

:-)

How about "Easy Migration Paths from Linux to FreeBSD/Darwin/etc."?

:-)

[rbos.livejournal.com]

I could see it. They can be fun to write. I did a weekly column for linux.com for a while. unpaid tho.

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

"How to Escape from Windows XP for the Linux Virgin"

(can you guess what I'm contemplating?)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I might have a clue. :) And there's a variety of answers there, too, ranging from SuSE and mandreake to Fedora or Gentoo to SymphonyOS.

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Who's the audience?

If it's geeks interested in what goes on under the hood, then you write one class of stuff.

If it's people trying to get work done, then the technical details matter less than the practicum of "how to make it do what's required."

One of the main problems that everyone in the open source community has is verifying that their chosen OS will drive all the devices found on a given M/B (and add-in cards) correctly and well. If I start from "I want to use Linux" whose M/B and/or system do I buy?

PCs go obsolete so fast that the industry doesn't build reliable machines. Why don't all PCs have ECC RAM subsystems these days? Why aren't all disk subsystems RAID5? What can those of us who want to buy a computer and run it into the ground (i.e. to the point that it has no resale value at all) do to make the machine work reliably and verifiably over its lifetime?

Personally, I second johnkzin's sentiments also, but I'm a NetBSD (http://www.netbsd.org/) developer...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Target audience is, absolutely, a relevant question. And I think that will depend on the subject of the article. There would be a different audience for "How can I tell what performance tuning my Linux system needs?" and "I want to try Linux, which one should I try?"

Topics

[felinecanine.livejournal.com]

My current interest would be digital video editing for Linux. I suppose that currently would be more of a topic of interest to home users than business users. But I suspect it's something that will be popular in the coming years.